


Story and Life

by quigonejinn



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 16:39:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5593381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/pseuds/quigonejinn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>You touch his shoulder again, and he looks at you.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Story and Life

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to [DW](http://quigonejinn.dreamwidth.org/105117.html) on 7/26/2006. Style tweaks made before posting to AO3.
> 
> Companion story [here](http://quigonejinn.livejournal.com/99327.html).

Here is the story: when you are young, your parents give you to the Jedi. They lived on Corsucant, but originated on a planet that survived famine because of Jedi intervention, so they are proud to have a child in the Order. After a period of time, your Master selects you as a student. For years, the two of you go from planet to space station to galactic conference to planet to colony to stopover on Corsucant for new robes and fresh orders to royal suites to sleeping on the ground in a mining tunnel, your robes wrapped around you and water dripping into your face from the pumps above.

All in all, it is not a bad life. You could have continued living that way for a great deal of time.

...

Naboo was not the first water planet: there were plenty before, though none after. Tropical ones, temperate ones. Arctic ones where the water as mostly frozen into ice. There was the memorable one where the water was entirely the waste metabolite of a certain branch of chordate animals, and halfway through the exhibition match, your master decided that if the ruler was going to be asinine enough to condition the treaty on a display of Jedi martial prowess, he was going to be ungracious enough to drink water in front of them. A number of court ladies fainted, and it was very, very noisy in the arena once the shock had passed.

Your master finished drinking, then looked up at you. You handed him a napkin. He blotted his mouth. He was not sweating or even breathing hard; there was something like a smirk in the corner of his mouth.

"The harmonic oscillation of the crystal in my lightsaber is asynchronous again."

You frowned. "I could take a turn in the ring. The King did offer to let both of us fight the droids at the same time."

He gave you a slightly aggrieved look.

So you undid your lightsaber and handed it to him.

...

When you were eleven, your master suggested that you ought to meet your parents: it was a confluence of Senate inactivity, a backlog of paperwork large enough that the Quartermasters had grounded your master until he made a dent in it, and something else. Some notion of your master's that you ought to meet them. Talk to them. It surprised you, but you supposed it would be educational, so you went to the Archives to determine where, exactly, it was that they lived. Were they alive? How many siblings did you have?

Three brothers and a sister, it turned out. They lived together, but no longer on Corsucant. When you sent them a message, they were amenable, and you arranged a short-hop transport, followed by shuttlecraft to the suburb of the main city where they lived.

After dinner, you sat with them in your father's garden.

A wall ran along the back; vines had been trained up the side of it. Dusk had advanced enough so that half the sky was purple and gold, and the garden was planted with some kind of dark green shrub with white flowers that almost seemed to glow in the half light: you were eleven. One of your older brothers spilled his glass of juice midway through the meal and spent the rest of the meal embarrassed into silence and unable to look at anything beyond his plate; your other older brother was studying engineering, but it was not, to your eye, trained in a rigorous school on the subject since you could count -- particularly advanced.

"Dinner was superbly prepared," you said, bowing to your mother. "Thank you for receiving me."

...

"What is that?" There is a note of amazement in your Master's voice.

"It is one of the native swamp mosquitoes that you expressed curiosity in examining, Master. Or rather -- it was." A pause. "Then you used the Force on it."

...

The first time you try to save your Master's life, he doesn't need saving. He was pretending helplessness until his captors revealed the location of the data disk, and it was a matter of luck that he had located the disk when you came charging through. When he tucked you under his arm and carry you out of the compound, your sense of shame so strong that yowould surely expire.

Or at least lose consciousness.

At the very least.

You didn't. 

"Erm," you said, a little after he set you back on the ground.

He looksed down from an immense distance at you. And you could still feel the heat from the blast at your back. There was crackling and roaring and the sound of metal deforming in the heat of the fire.

Why haven't you expired yet? Surely, your heart should have stopped by now. "Erm," you repeat.

And your Master laughs, reaches down, and smothers, with his fingers and a bit of the Force, part of your robe that is still smoldering.

...

After it has become completely dark, it is time for you to go. After taking your leave, your father walks you to the front gate of the house. He has put on a sweater, as the night is cold, and the streetlamps have lit. The air smells pleasantly of the local conifers, and a car is coming for you. It will take you back to the shuttle station. From there, you will return to Corsucant.

"Good luck," your father says, finally. There is a container of food in his hands. Leftovers. You suspect that he has received instructions to give them to you, but he seems a little flustered. When you are grown, you suspect that you will look like him; all of your brothers bear a strong resemblance around the eyes and the mouth.

The aircar arrives and, in a rush of air, drops to the street. The door opens.

"Thank you very much," you say. "Please tell my mother that I truly enjoyed her cooking. It was a true pleasure to meet my family."

You bow to him, formally, from the waist.

After a moment of hesitation, he bows in return, and you board the aircar without taking the gift of food. How would you explain the restriction against personal property?

...

The first time Anakin saves your life, it is one of those times when you could have needed saving, but you might have well found your way out of it.

You are in the mines of Lorzan with the hostage that you rescued. Since Anakin is not fully ready for a field mission, you have been doing almost entirely diplomatic missions: you are beginning to realize that you might be some good at it and that you enjoy them, too. When a splinter faction stormed the talks, you found yourself regretting the interruption.

But the mine shaft collapsed, and now, Anakin is using the Force to dig his way through a ton or two of rock. You can feel him coming through the rock for you, and when he pushes the final rock aside, he staggers, recovers, and comes sprinting over to you. He falls to his knees in front of you. "Master," he pants. "Master, are you hurt?"

His face is ash white. The hostage, who has her head on your knee, moans. She is terribly injured; a medic crew comes running up to put her on a stretcher, but Anakin doesn't turn even when they load her and take her away. He is looking at you with such intensity.

"Come, Anakin," you say and touch his shoulder and stand. Your ankle is twisted, but you are ignoring it for now, and Anakin is so exhausted he has to lean against the mine wall to stagger to his feet. It is tempting to pick him up and carry him back to the shuttle, never mind your ankle. He might even be so tired that he would not protest.

But you don't. You touch his shoulder again, and he looks at you.

"Thank you, Padawan."

The two of you walk back slowly. You even put a little weight on his shoulder.

...

You remember watching your Master fight with your lightsaber. It was too small for his hands, and the resistance frequency of your blade was different, but he adjusted. He made it graceful. You remember, too, being in the aircar and seeing your father, who might as well have been a stranger, standing in the street with food in his hands, barely able to look up because of the blast from the aircar's ventral ports.

...

The last mission you ever have with your Master is to a water planet. There are substantial land masses, but the weather is shaped by massive bodies of water. There are three sentient species on the planet, but they are all linked to the water, and you remind yourself that you actually like water planets most of the time. The weather tends to be stable, and the food tends to significantly superior to desert planets where everybody ate reconstituted protein and two kinds of imported grain. If the mission takes place in the city, where there won't be much mucking around in swamps and slapping bloodsuckers only a little smaller than your palm, you would, you told yourself, be satisfied.

In the time immediately after Qui-Gon died, you would think back to that even though you knew you should not. The pain was still too raw, and attachment is part of the path to the Dark Side. You would fight it, but the emotion would still be there. The voice would say: Naboo would have been the last time anyways.

Eventually, after you come to appreciate Anakin, the voice changes. It starts to say: Naboo was the beginning.

...

When Anakin is sixteen, he tries to get you to sleep with him: you remember the years you spent agonizing about how to best go about it with your Master, running through this possibility and that, trying to figure out how to minimize the possibility of rejection, but Anakin does it at a practice match. He did not want to practice anymore, so you showed him -- again -- that all the Force in the universe is no good without discipline. You knocked the breath out of him, and you are on top of in. There are red spots on your cheeks because he is getting better; there are red spots on him from, you suspect, anger.

Also, from you knocking him into a wall. He lifts his hips against your legs and opens his mouth. You stare at him, and his face turns completely red, and he turns away from you.

...

Your younger brother dies, and your family leaves a message for you at the Temple. By chance you are able to attend the funeral. It is raining; your father is in a liftchair because of mental deterioration. He is disoriented and cannot recognize anyone; his chair must be guided around by your older brother, and you introduce Anakin as your student.

There is silence while your brother studies both you and your student, and then he bows. Your mother is already dead of the same degenerative disease: thanks to the Jedi, your parents survived the Famine, but not before the Famine worked itself into their bodies. From the demographic data, that is starting to come clear.

...

The Order does not have holidays. There are no birthdays or Giving Days or Festivals of the Temple. The life of a Jedi is his work, and his work is his life, but sometimes, Jedi bend to local customs. A grateful king on Tersh IV declares a Festival of Gifts and Thanks in your honor, and Anakin gives you box within a box within a box. Each is mirrored or set with colorful glass or embedded with a light, so that it causes the boxes larger than it to throw beautiful lights on the wall.

Careful selection of polarized materials lays patterns, and red chases gold across the wall. Blue lies in green over your fingers. Many marketplaces on this world sell something similar, but this is handmade. Hand-soldered. You recognize the technique and, also, the motif of lightsabers along the lid. This is exactly the kind of intricate, careful work that Anakin loathes most, and you look at Anakin. He is almost taller than you and looks larger sometimes, what with the breadth of his shoulders and his choice of robe color.

Both of you can hear the festival in the street below.

"I am sorry, Master," Anakin says, quietly, with great intensity. He bites his lip and casts his eyes downward. "I do not mean to be so troublesome or to interrupt like that. I want to be a good Padawan. I do. It's just -- "

You study his face, and he breaks off, overcome. Eventually, you nod at him, and he gasps in relief. It is hard not to smile in return -- he is smiling, and it makes his face brighter than the box in your palm.

...

"I was on this planet with my Master before. We came twice, and we stood, in fact, on this exact spot the second time," you tell Anakin. "The first time, a terrible civil war was being fought. We were part of the peace process."

You do not tell him stories about your days as Padawan very much, at least not these days. He is a Knight, after all. The youngest that anyone can remember.

Anakin frowns. "What happened the second time?"

"After we left, the dominant clan broke the peace treaty and destroyed the subordinate clan. There were six million dead across the planet, and the dominant clan used the gorge over there as a mass burial for the third-largest city on the planet. The smell, you can imagine, was dreadful."

The planet had become a wasteland, too: the grey mountains were still beautiful with their blue-purple clouds, but a species-specific contagion bred in the corpses of the murdered, and the second time that you and your master came to the planet, it was because of the the plague victims. Half their people were dead; the rest were dying. They needed the Republic's help to avoid extinction.

...

Padme was not the only one: this could have been why you were deceived as to the intensity of it. Anakin had wanted you very badly; sometimes, he still did, but most of the time, he had both lovers and partners. He tried to be discreet, but discretion did not come easily to your student. There was something touching about how seriously he took them, in fact.

...

One night, on a swamp planet during splintered negotiation talks that broke down into fighting and military movement, you showed young Anakin a way to use the Force to keep mosquitoes and other parasites from the skin. It required a great deal of control over the Force, and you thought it would be a useful drill for him: a dozen years later, he was a grown Padawan, due to become a Knight in months, and he used it again.

You were exhausted from the day's march through the swamps, and you neglected to put it over yourself before you slept. Anakin did it for you; you still remember his smile when you woke to the dawn sun and found him looking at you and his Force enclosure over you both.

"Good morning, Master," he said and grinned some more. His face was grey with tiredness and white from the morning sun. You are about to tell him that he should have rested instead of staying awake, but you look down at your arm. There was a very frustrated mosquito the size of a small bird, and it was trying to get its feeder tube through the layer of Force.

You smiled. Anakin turned upset at this because he thought you were mocking him, though, so you laughed more and touched his cheek. He was nineteen, and it was soft as the down of a baby bird.

...

Years pass. There is a war; it continues for so long that, at times, you forget whether it ever had a beginning, and eventually, on one of the rare times when you can return to Corsucant, you find a letter waiting for you at the Temple.

It is the personal representative of your father, who has finally died after a long illness. Your father has left you some property; you make a few arrangements and transfer it, sight unseen, to the Temple, then turn from the monitor and look out the window and study the city that composes the entire planet. Instead of stars, Corsucant has the lights of transports moving through the ionosphere. They are just as bright, though somewhat more unstable and quicker-moving.

For your part, you are slowly coming to realize what a bleak time it had been after your Master died. You are well past thirty, and it is still not an easy lesson to admit -- you wanted Qui-Gon's approval even more than you wanted him. Did you love it more than you loved him?

The Force is first, and the Order is next. The Republic is third. It will always be that way; it must always be that way, but you do not realize how much you, yourself, had hungered after love until you see it on Anakin's face.

...

Your Master used to make a speech: it was his standard answer to those who had questions about the Jedi Order, and the discussion of love and attachment and why Jedi could not love with attachment always ended the same way. What would you do for love?

...

You never had sex with Anakin neither while he was a Padawan nor after had become a Knight. He tried when he was sixteen, again when he was seventeen, and after he became a Knight, there were always hints that he was amenable to it. He would look at you a certain way. When you touched him, there would, sometimes, be heat.

Still, you never so much as kissed him, though you have had other lovers, and you know it could have happened. The Jedi do not have many rules about either love or sex, but still, you did not. It would have been wrong. Anakin would have formed an attachment. You could see it in his eyes; you know it in his nature, and you knew that you, yourself, had already formed one. Sometimes, it seemed that he would reproach you for not being able to give him that, and it makes you wonder how Qui-Gon saw you when you were after him in the same way.

It makes you wonder: what is it that makes Padawans love their masters in this way? Why does love take people in this way?

That is the truth, though. Anakin loves you, and you love Anakin. He is your brother; he is your son. He is the thing that makes you happy, the one person in all the universe that you love best, and in your more fanciful moments, you think of what you would say about Anakin to Qui-Gon if he were still alive. Anakin is your family, your friend, your partner, and here is the truth: someday, you will die.

Someday, even if Anakin chooses to remain with you after he becomes a Knight, there will be time for you and Anakin to part, and you hope it is easier for him than it was for you. It might be a swamp planet; it might be a desert planet; it might be a planet with beautiful mountains and a history of death. You might take another Padawan at some point. Anakin makes you angrier in the course of a month than you think you ever angered Qui-Gon over a dozen years. In fact, you spent the first two years of teaching Anakin asking forgiveness for all those times when you argued with Qui-Gon or were stubborn about something. Rregardless, you cannot define this emotion in your chest.

It is pride; it is love; it is joy mixed with worry. On those occasions when you have, for one reason or another, used Anakin's lightsaber, it felt perfectly right in your hand. It was neither too heavy nor too light, and when you look at Anakin, the emotion makes you straighten and look to the sky.

You hope your parting is a long time distant.

The Force. The Order. The Republic. In that order -- despite yourself, it is why, perhaps, you say nothing about Padme.

...

"How is your hand, Anakin?"

"A little cold this morning, but not bad."

...

One morning, when you were still young and Qui-Gon alive in his body, the two of you were on a water planet, and the two of you had slept all night in your robes on the swamps. Perhaps it was Naboo. Perhaps it was Shandramay. Perhaps it was not any of these, but you woke next to him, and because you loved him, that was all that mattered.

It was when you still wanted him for a lover so badly that you would have done anything but step over the line that he and the Force, it seemed, had drawn, so you watched him while he slept: the light began as blue and grey, then turned pink and gold. It played over his face. It showed the worn places in his face and the shape of his mouth. The roughness of his beard. After so many years of looking at him and thinking that he was beautiful, you barely saw the strange angle of his nose or the slope of his forehead.

You sat by him, and somehow, in the half-light, you let go of your desire for him.

You might have touched his face, but you did not. Soon, it would almost become regular daylight, and it would be time to begin the day, but you watched him. You decided to be satisfied with what you had: it was so much if only you could make yourself be enough. You put your arms around your knees and looked at him, still sleeping, with the Force under his skin. He was old, and you were young, but the Force was in both of you, and both of you were Jedi. When he woke, he was amused at how happy you could be after a night of being cold and wet and miserable and sleeping with mosquitoes.

You never dreamed that you should distrust Anakin; you worried more that your heart would betray him.

...

In your memories, there is height and beauty in the Temple. You remember the light of a thousand planets, and you remember that your Master used to make a speech at planetary banquets: the mission had been successful, and the eating was done. People were curious about the Order and its restrictions, and Qui-Gon had a speech prepared. He gave it every time. He would clear his throat and say: love is powerful, and attachment is dangerous. That is why Jedi cannot have it.

Consider what you might do for love. What would you give? What have you already given?

The dawns are cold and fierce on Tatooine, and Qui-Gon cannot be there too frequently, or he will exhaust himself. On days when the dust storms are low, you can see to the place where Luke is being raised by his father's family.

Some nights, you dream of Corsucant, unbearably distant in the black sky.

...

The question: _what have you given for love?_

These days, the reply: _all that you ever hoped to have._


End file.
